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Jazz in Saint Joos – A walk through a gallery of jazz musicians only to be seen after-hours along the Chausée de Louvain in Saint-Joos-ten-Noode

Belgium has a reputation for jazz. At least in Belgium’s own mind. Belgians will be quick to remind you that “they” invented the quintessential jazz instrument. Well, to be sure, Adolphe Saxwas Belgian. But in 1846 when he patented the saxophone he was living in Paris. Also he intended his instrument to be used by marching military bands. The jazz saxophone didn’t really become a thing until the 1920s.

Okay, the saxophone isn’t the only claim Belgians have on jazz. Even somebody as ignorant as I am of this music form has heard of a couple of Belgium’s big-name contributions to the jazz pantheon. Toots Thielemans (who I know of as a harmonica player) was Belgian before he became American. And Django Reinhardt, the demon gypsy jazz guitarist, turns out to have been born here.

History apart, there is a flourishing modern jazz scene in Brussels. If this is your preference you’re pretty well served. Even if you’re not particularly keen, you still find yourself stumbling across jazz references wandering about town. Never more so than along the first stretch of the Chausée de Louvain/Leuvensteenweg between the Madou metro station at Place Madou and St Josse Place.

This is a well-trafficked though rundown shopping street on the edge of the European quarter. It’s just inside Belgium’s smallest and most densely populated municipality, Saint-Joos-ten-Noode. During the working day, you probably won’t see anything so much out of the ordinary, but walk down here in the evening after the shops are shut, or on a Sunday, and you’re confronted by a gallery of jazz musicians.

The pictures are painted on the roll-down metal blinds that cover the doors or the whole display windows of some of the shops. The portraits show an international array of stars, each playing their instruments. Behind each is something “typical” of their home country – the Eiffel Tower, the Congress building in Washington DC, the Sydney Opera House. I’m not sure how many there are, but when I went to take photographs for this article at the beginning of November I found eleven. (Though the pictures are numbered up to eighteen.)

As I’ve implied, I’m not a great jazz aficionado. I don’t actually recognise the names of any of these musicians (with the exception of Josephine Baker). But several of them are quite obviously jazz musicians. Here is Terumasa Hino blowing his horn in front of Mount Fuji. Here is Manu Dibango playing his sax in front of what appears to be a spiral playground slide. And here is Nils-Henning Örsted Pedersen plucking his double bass in front of a seal. No, sorry, it’s the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen harbour.

A couple of the pictures include an Internet website address: sarendip.org. Follow the link and you find the website of a street art collective, Sarendip. They look as if they were quite active a few years ago. The most recent entry on their website, though, dates from 2012. There are two entries from September 2011 titled “St-Jazz Ten Nood” (sic). It isn’t entirely clear to me what the website is trying to say. However, I think the pictures were created to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of a jazz festival – Saint Jazz – that takes place annually in Saint Joos every September.

Well, these are the remnants of that commemoration. I’m guessing that some of the pictures have since been removed – the blinds replaced – but it’s impressive that the ones that remain have escaped being graffitied over. Honour among graffiti artists perhaps. How long will the pictures that remain last, I wonder.

Maastricht in the Netherlands – a photo essay and a wander through this charming, picturesque little city in company with Mrs SC and TheSupercargo.

I wrote last time that I went through a bit of a dark patch in October and November, but even in the dark there can be flashes of light. At the end of October we celebrate Mrs SC’s birthday. It can be hard to wrestle the time from her schedule, but last year we managed four days in Florence. This year we pulled an overnighter in Maastricht.

This little Dutch city on the Maas river (downstream from Belgian Liège where the river is the Meuse) claims to be the Netherlands’ oldest. Apparently there’s a dispute with Nijmegen. It’s probably best known today – for those of us outside Benelux – as the city that gave it’s name to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. That was the treaty that established the European Union and the euro as a currency. Which probably puts Maastricht near the top of the EU-haters’ hit-list.

A shame if true. It’s an appealing little city – or at any rate the centre is. But even the docks and factories by the side of the river, run-down or disused now, have a picturesque charm in the autumn sunlight.

Walking around the centre, you can see how the city grew. Maastricht was awarded its city charter in 1204, and immediately started building protective walls. This gate proudly displays a date – 1229 – making it, I suppose, one of the earliest city gates. It’s called the Helpoort – the Gate of Hell, though it looks fairly innocuous now.

Clearly a wealthy city, like Brussels and other places in the area Maastricht outgrew one ringwall after another. There are well-preserved remnants of city walls from various periods inside the city, incorporated now into the structure of the town.

Look through a slit window in one massive bastion and peer into a room already decorated for Christmas. Is it someone’s living room or the interior of a shop? (It’s a shop – even in forward-looking Maastricht, private homes are not decorated for Christmas at the end of October.)

We reached Maastricht in the afternoon on Saturday 29th after an adventurous train journey. Not so adventurous really, just that we missed our stop to change for the Maastricht train. It meant we took a detour through the surprisingly hilly country towards Eupen before the ticket inspector put us right. The history teacher in me was interested to see Eupen. The victors after the First World War granted this largely German-speaking area to Belgium in reparations. Nazi Germany took it back in 1940, but Belgium regained it in 1945.

That first day was overcast and dull. Not great photography weather – especially not from a moving train. It was better in Maastricht. In the Vrijthof, a big, light, open square, lots of people were standing around or sitting in pairs looking one another in the face. Hand-draw signs asked “Where has the human connection gone?”

We stayed not far from the Vrijthof at a little hotel on a street called Achter de Molens (Behind the Mills). There’s a restaurant, Le Petit Bonheur, in the same building which seems popular. At least, there was a late-night party going on there the night we stayed. Hallowe’en, of course. But it really didn’t disturb us because we were out exploring the town by night and drinking in a local bar – Peter’s Café.

The following day, though, the autumn sun came out and we took a long photo-walk through the old town. The sun and the turning leaves made Maastricht even more attractive.

At the newest gates to the old city (I think they date from the 16th century), the Jecker, a tributary of Maas, was once canalised into a moat. The Jecker is still here, and the moat, to the delight of quite a variety of water birds. And one or two photographers.

A little beyond, we crossed the Maas by the modern pedestrian and bicycle bridge, the high bridge – Hoge Brug. On the the far bank, Wyck seems to be an early suburb of Maastricht.

There was some sort of a local food day in preparation in Wyck. This whole street, Rechtstraat, was blocked off and filled with a laid table. But not, at the time we passed, with any food. The sign advertises “La Saison Culinaire de l’Euregio”. The Euregio turns out to be a local cross-border region covering this part of the Netherlands and adjacent districts in Germany. It’s been building cultural links (and other links) here since 1958.

I must share this picture that suggests there’s a sold front against direct advertising in Maastricht. I saw many letter boxes – or letter slots perhaps – where the home owners made it clear they didn’t want advertising or free publications. Nee! Nee! and Nee! Nee! But this house had the best contrast between the Nees and the surrounding material. I should add – in the interest of balance – that I did see the very occasional Ja! but never in a context that made it easy to photograph.

One final picture. This is a representation of the typical Wyck resident. That’s how I interpret sculptor Frans Carlier’s title “De Wiekeneer”. A stoic citizen who strides on his way though the sharp wind off the Maas cuts like a knife. Though I may be reading more into it than I should.

All in all it was a very nice short break, though we didn’t see everything that Maastricht has to offer. There is said to be a fine collection of early Dutch paintings in the Bonnefantenmuseum, but it was closed when we came by. Perhaps another time. It’s only a couple of hours away.

(I find myself saying this rather a lot nowadays, but there’s always somewhere new to visit instead.)

Remembrance Day 2016 as commemorated in Brussels and a meditation (or a rant) on the meaning of the day, plus an apology for the recent break in service.

It’s five weeks since I last posted here, and this post is itself a good week late. I apologise for this, but I’ve been taking an unplanned break from blogging. I’m recovering from an operation (and visiting with Mr Despond and Anxty his dog). I’m hoping to return Stops and Stories to regular service now. We’ll see.

This week, some photos from November 11th. Remembrance Day is observed here in Belgium for good historical reasons, though perhaps with less hysteria than in the UK. Although the day is a national holiday, the crowds turning out to observe the ceremony were conspicuous by their absence.

The whole of the road from the Royal Palace to the Congress Column (where the ceremony took place) was blocked off and empty. Beyond, way off down the road, you could see the dome of the Royal Church of St Mary. It was as if the authorities expected huge crowds, but there was only a small gathering. If you discount the soldiers, the troops of scouts and cadets and what appeared to be an invited audience of schoolchildren, there were perhaps 200 or so of us.

It doesn’t matter. It was a raw, cold day and, honestly, I think it’s understandable that most people chose to stay away and get on with their lives. I wouldn’t want the commemoration of the end of the First World War to be forgotten. At the same time the ostentatious militarism and emotionalism that the British indulge in annually on November 11th I find more than a bit distasteful.

The war was a terrible event, it claimed millions of lives. If we can remember it in the spirit of “never again” then that seems good to me. But what goes on in Britain nowadays doesn’t fall into that category. The bullying that ensures every public figure wears an artificial poppy for weeks before and after the event. The pomp and ritual of the Remembrance itself, the massed bands and uniforms, speeches and cannonades. As the last of the veteran survivors pass away, the event is extended and extended. “Our glorious dead” from World War Two, from Korea, the Falklands, the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan…

It all gives the lie to that line about “the war to end all wars”. We – and by “we” I mean the Brits – we don’t seem any longer really to be commemorating the conned and the killed from the world’s deadliest cock-up. (And of course it’s since been surpassed by other, similar events.) Nor do we seem any longer to be empathising with the lost generation or sympathising with the survivors. Instead we seem to be celebrating the on-rolling juggernaut of war. Worshipping the god to whom we’ve sacrificed a quota of every generation – not only of our people but also of theirs. Them, the many enemies of our imperial splendour.

Well. Pardon my rant. This Remembrance Day in Brussels had its pomp and uniforms – and a King as a figurehead – but it didn’t seem nearly so triumphalist or popular as Anglophone Remembrance Days I’m used to.

The lancers and trumpeters included women soldiers talking to their bored horses. There was a posse of street cleaners with shovels and wheelbarrows cleaning up after the horses while the ceremony was underway. The King was followed about comically by a fussy group of TV journalists with cameras on their shoulders and boom microphones in socks.

There was a three minutes silence.

Then king got in his limo to cheers of “Vive le Roi!” (I’m not kidding.) And the rest of us broke up made our several ways home.

Yoko Tsuno reflected: A visit to Japanese engineer Yoko Tsuno’s strip frame at Rue Terre-Neuve on the Brussels Comic Book Route

Just before the Comic Strip Festival earlier in the year, I took myself off on a photo-walk following the Brussels Comic Book Route. Brussels is proud of the Belgian comic book tradition, which stretches back to Tintin in 1928 (and earlier). Celebrating this, Brussels has decorated house gables across the city with comic-strip frames. The City of Brussels tourist offices can provide a printed map so you can follow the route. Or you can follow it in virtual reality on line here.

At the time I published my photo essay from the Festival it felt like too much of a good thing to follow up with more comic strip photos. This week, though, I’m travelling and rather busy with personal matters. It feels OK to share these photos of the Yoko Tsuno cartoon at Rue Terre-Neuve.

Yoko Tsuno is Japanese engineer. Her adventures on Earth and in outer space started in 1970 and currently run to 27 volumes. Sad to say, most are not available in English. Read more about her on this Wikipedia page.

As you see (below) I do try trying to do more than just reproduce other people’s artwork. I was pleased to find the following reflections in the windows on either side of the street.

New York Stories – and the people who tell them… and the photographer who reports them

Review of Humans of New York: Stories

A photo-book by Brandon Stanton

Browsing the photo-books in a bookshop recently, looking for a birthday present, I came across this volume. I picked it up and leafed through it and thought it very attractive, but not quite what I was looking for as a present. I also thought it was rather expensive, but it stuck in my mind.

A few days later I found it again, in another shop, and picked it up and carried on leafing through it. The layout and quality of the book is attractive and the photos are portraits of interesting looking people. Best of all, attached to each photo are stories about the people portrayed. But, no, I still thought it was too expensive.

Then I came across it again, and I decided, OK, by the rule of threes I am obliged to buy this book. What the hell, it’s only money. And indeed it was only money – but now it’s a big, beautiful book of photographs and stories on my bookshelf. A book it took me four days to read even though it’s a photo-book. (I rationed myself; I took it slowly.)

10,000 people

According to his website, Brandon Stanton – the author and photographer – moved to New York in 2010 with the intention of becoming a portrait photographer. He set himself the task of photographing 10,000 people. Apparently he started by just taking the photos for himself and then branched out into sharing them on Facebook. When people responded favourably, he took it a step further and set up his website and started posting in various other social media outlets. (He now has several million followers on Instagram alone.)

After a time he started asking the people he was photographing for quotes to caption their portraits, and went the further step and began to interview them. Humans of New York: Stories is his second volume. The first was just Humans of New York. This is what he writes in his introduction.

Humans of New York did not result from a flash of inspiration. Instead, it grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up… The first Humans of New York book… included some quotes and stories, but largely it represented the photographic origins of HONY. It provided an exhaustive visual catalogue of life on the streets of the city. But soon after it went to print, it became obvious that another book was waiting to be made – one that includes the in-depth storytelling that the blog is known for today. This is that book.

New York stories

It is a wonderful book: 428 pages of photographs and stories. Some of them pithy one-liners…

“You’d better snap it quick because I’m jumping on the first thing that comes down this track.”

“I’m late for a show. You can try to take my photo while I hail a cab.”

“I’m trying to write a book based on myself, but I keep changing.”

“I started taking heroin to get away from the draft, then I joined the army to get away from the heroin.”

“You’re not find out a thing about me”

“Our agents set us up.”

“I’m a science writer. I like anything complicated.”

“I shouldn’t have moved in with him just because I was lonely.”

Others are longer pieces – some of them linked to 2 or more photographs.

“I wasn’t planning on it happening. It just happened. I don’t know what to say. I lost about 10 or 15 pounds during the affair, just from the stress. The longer it went on, the more the other woman wanted to control me – that’s how they always get. She wanted more and more of me as time went on: ‘Come over,’ ‘Let’s do this,’ ‘Let’s do that.’ It got more and more difficult to hide. I’d been with my wife since we were 16, so she knew something was up. One day she just straight-up asked me, and I said: ‘Yes.’ It was almost a relief. There was crying, screaming, yelling. All my shit went out on the lawn. Then it was back in the house. Then it was out on the lawn again. But we went to therapy and we got over it, and she forgave me. I think.”

Dialogue

Sometimes there are dialogues between the photographer and his subject:

“Studying the brain is like working in a toy store. Nothing could be more fucking fun.”
“What do you think is the greatest weakness of the brain?”
“That’s a lousy question! I’m not answering it.”
“Why is it a lousy question?”
“What do you want me to say? Road rage? That we get pissed and shoot people? That the newest parts of our brain should have been in the oven a little longer? How is that going to help you? If you ask a crappy question, you’ll never get a decent answer. You need to ask smaller questions – questions that give you a pathway to finding some more pertinent information. The major advances in brain science don’t come from asking crappy questions like, ‘What is consciousness?’ they come from microanalysis. They come from discovering pertinent information at the cellular level.”

Leaf through

I just leafed through the book again there and disappeared for 10 minutes. It’s such a fascinating document. For anyone who takes photographs – for anyone who is interested in the stories that people tell – the book is catnip.

I’ve always admired people who can take street photos – portraits of strangers – and then talk to them. I’d like to know how Brandon goes about that. Does he take candid photographs and then talk to his subjects, or does he ask permission first? Some of the pictures in the book look so completely unstudied that I think he must take them without asking. Others are clearly posed.

How?

He does everything he can to warm up his potential subjects, wearing a backward baseball cap, gray hoodie and New Balance sneakers to look casual. When he approaches a stranger, he hunches over or squats down, sometimes sprawling his 6-foot-4 [1.95m] frame on the sidewalk.
“It’s all about making myself as nonthreatening as possible,” he said. “I lower my voice, I get down on the ground.”

So that’s what he does now, but I wonder if it was always how he worked.

My other question, to which I haven’t found an answer, is how he gets his subjects’ permission to publish their photos. Does he have some sort of a printed formula he gets them to sign or does he just count on them not complaining? This is especially relevant for the photographs he’s taken of young children. (Though the captions sometimes suggest there’s a parent just out of frame.)

Better on paper

As soon as I realised Brandon Stanton had an Instagram account, I started following him. Here’s a strange thing. I don’t find his photos on-line nearly as appealing as the ones in his book. I don’t know whether that’s because as he’s become more famous he has changed his style. (Apparently he lives by his photos now.) The verbiage of the stories he reports now seems to overwhelm the photos. It could be the format, or it could be that the photos in the book are a “best of” selection. Or perhaps he is still evolving as a portrait photographer – and has evolved in a direction I’m less willing to follow.

No matter, I’ve got the book now and I’m sure I’ll be dipping back into Humans of New York: Stories for quite some time to come.

Is Humans of New York: Stories expensive? It may be expensive in bookshops, but I’ve since discovered the book on-line at half the price I paid for it.

Like this:

The Saint Job Fair in Uccle: giants, a brass band, death and the baker, a boy in a bubble, a jousting knight and a sleeping cat… among others things

About the middle of September, all around Brussels (and for all I know around Belgium too) fairs are taking place. Some of them seem to blend into the weekly markets (such as the one at Place Flagey), but others are unique to themselves. There are sideshows and performances, parades and music, and some take the opportunity to promote a local district or municipality. My guess is that they have developed from harvest festivals in much the same way as Thanksgiving in the USA, but as local rather than national affairs. Last year, my first September in Brussels, I simply registered what was going on. This year I thought I should get out with the camera and take some photos.

Then came the question – where to go? Up the road towards the city centre, the Parish of Saint Giles (Parvais Saint-Gilles) was advertising a major effort with processions from four different starting points in the municipality all leading to a celebration of Les porteuses d’eau (the women waterbearers). I was tempted.

Then I saw that my own municipality was offering the “129th Annual Market of Saint Job”.

I’m not sure why the Old Testament prophet is dignified as “Saint” Job in this corner of Belgium. A trawl through the Internet doesn’t leave me much the wiser (though I really doubt it has anything to do with the Orthodox Saint Job of Moscow, Wikipedia). But I’ve always had a soft spot for Job, so Saint Job’s market won the toss.

The Belgians have a fascination for géants – giants. This seems to be a tradition that has hung over from the Middle Ages. Every district of Brussels has its own giants who are wheeled out (literally) every year for these fairs. They also make occasional appearances at other spectacles and events to represent the spirit of their district. At the Saint Job fair the two principle giants were a fellow in a bicorn hat and a curly-haired blonde. The two had a couple of half-sized giant children who orbited around them.

Several of their helpers (the people necessary to manhandle them over cobbles and kerbs) were also dressed up – as you can see from the photo. They looked like toys the giant children might want to pick up and play with.

Of course, you can’t have a parade or a festival without music, so there was a brass band on hand. In this photo you can just make out the tuba-distorted reflection of the male giant at the head of the parade.

The band had a lot of blowing to do, so they were happy take a break now and again. Here on the steps outside the church. (I think they’d want me to remind you, by the way, that the saxophone was invented by a Belgian – Adolphe Sax. You can post your heartfelt thanks below in the comments. Or not. As you wish. 🙂 )

Apart from the parade and the giants there was an exposition d’animeaux de la ferme. (This was one goat, one donkey, some chickens and a small selection of child-magnet-rabbits).The donkey was very obliging and happy to pose for photos when other people pointed their cameras at her. Me, she turned her back on.

There were also some ponies that had been coralled into an area like a small roundabout, and were walking around in a circle. Each had a small child uncertainly perched on top. There was a recorded – very distorted – voice blasting out a message in French. A message punctuated with the sound of a cracking whip and a “Yeeha!” I just can’t feel convinced by a “Yeeha!” when it’s part of a sentence in French. I’m probably deeply prejudiced.

The inevitable stall for face painting meant there were quite a number of kids running around with startling faces. The one that startled me most of all was this young man’s face. He was watching with intense interest as this baker demonstrated his craft. You could buy samples of the bread once baked, but personally I found the presence of death at the baker’s side a bit off-putting.

There were other things for kids to do at the fair. They could visit the exposition de chats d’exception. A lot of very indolent pedigree cats in travelling cages. The cat show took place in a rather a dark, enclosed hall, so I came away without any photos. On my way home, though, I met a street cat I know who was happy to let me photograph him in his favourite place, on warm tarmac under a parked car. By way of a fill-in photo for all the siamese and persians I missed.

There was a piste d’agilité vélo, a bicycle obstacle course, overseen by two dour police officers. It didn’t look a lot of fun and certainly while I was there, didn’t seem to be attracting much interest. By contrast kids could also get their parents to pay to have them zipped into plastic balls in a paddling pool. This looked to be really popular. It gives a new sense to the Boy in the Bubble.

It didn’t surprise me that so few kids were interested in the bicycle obstacle course, though I was disappointed so few wanted to try out the medieval jousting. However, I was patient and eventually a happy tourney rider showed up to reward me.

I hung around the fair from about 11 a.m. until 14.30 hoping to get some photos of the concours du chien le plus sympathique. I like sympathetic dogs – and these were very sympathetic dogs remember.

Unfortunately for me it seems everyone likes sympathetic dogs . (Well, of course. I should have guessed.) Probably the most well attended event of the fair, by the time the parade started the crowd pressed too densely around the stage. I tried, but there are no photos I want to share.

So I gave up. I was actually on my way home when I met another giant. Not quite in the same league as the official ones, perhaps, but he had a charming face and happily posed for me to take a photo. This Green Man was standing on stilts. He was about as tall as the bicorn hat giant’s shoulder.